Site Mobile Navigation

The Kitchen-Table Industrialists

Hands On Ayah Bdeir, the founder and, more significant, creator of littleBits.Credit
Brian Finke for The New York Times

Late in 2007, Ayah Bdeir was working in a plush office in Midtown Manhattan, making a lot of money and feeling miserable. She was a financial-software consultant for a technology company. One of her specialties was peddling software for credit-default swaps — among the many complex financial instruments that would soon wreak havoc on the planet. Somewhere there was a thing from which these derivatives were derived, but Bdeir, atop countless layers of transacting, was too far away to see it, much less touch it.

Bdeir is 28, a petite and round-faced woman, gregarious and combustible. As she describes it now, the virtuality of her working life was deeply upsetting; she felt surrounded by the inconsequential, the endless conversation about how to display the nominal on PowerPoints that called for the making of future PowerPoints. Just before year’s end, Bdeir quit. She secured a fellowship, for considerably lower pay, from an art and technology center in Chelsea. She knew that she wanted her next project to be the opposite of a credit-default swap — tangible, constructive. And then it hit her: the opposite of her make-believe transacting would be to make things. A few years earlier, as a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab, she fell in with a community that was trying to transform manufacturing — a new kind of small-scale, local manufacturing that could be done in the home, with machines no bigger than a microwave. Bdeir now resolved, over the strenuous objection of her mother and several friends, to become a new-age manufacturer.

At first, she pursued the idea as a financial-industry software executive might: she researched making, made plans to make and made PowerPoints about making. Meanwhile, she made nothing. Then, while earning some money by training not-very-tech-savvy designers in the use of electronics, Bdeir had the idea, in collaboration with a colleague, of making electronics components into Lego-like bricks that could be used by anybody, even the technically ungifted. She would make sets of self-contained bricks, filled with circuits, sensors, solar panels and motors that could be snapped together to create basic machines — for instance, a battery connected to a bulb and a pressure sensor that can illuminate or dim it. She would make things and allow others to make other things.

She would eventually turn the brick project into a business, selling $99 kits, called littleBits, for people to make their own crude gadgets. She wagered her career on the belief that in her resistance to the virtual, in her longing to make something actual, she was not alone.

And she wasn’t. Even as one boom era hurtled toward its end, a diffuse global community of nerds was at work on what it hoped would fuel the next one. They were coming to the same conclusion as Ayah Bdeir — that the new new thing was, in fact, things.

If you lived in Detroit in 1961 and watched Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” at a drive-in, you might have caught a 30-minute trailer called “American Maker,” sponsored by Chevrolet. “Of all things Americans are, we are makers,” its narrator began, over footage of boys building sand castles. “With our strengths and our minds and spirit, we gather, we form and we fashion: makers and shapers and put-it-togetherers.”

Fifty years on, the American maker is in a bad way. Such is the state of American industry that waste paper is among the top 10 exports to China, behind nuclear equipment but far ahead of traditional mainstays like iron and steel. Manufacturing employment has fallen by a third in the last decade alone, with more than 40,000 factories shutting down. More Americans today are unemployed than are wage-earning “put-it-togetherers.” But the American romance with making actual things is going through a resurgence. In recent years, a nationwide movement of do-it-yourself aficionados has embraced the self-made object. Within this group is a quixotic band of soldering, laser-cutting, software-programming types who, defying all economic logic, contend that they can reverse America’s manufacturing slump. America will make things again, they say, because Americans will make things — not just in factories but also in their own homes, and not because it’s artisanal or faddish but because it’s easier, better for the environment and more fun.

What makes this notion something less than complete fantasy is the availability of new manufacturing machines that are cheap, simple and compact enough for small companies, local associations and even amateur hobbyists to own and operate. What once only big firms with hulking factories could fabricate can now be made in a basement or by e-mailing a design to an online factory-for-hire. These machines can produce all sorts of things, including plastic pencil holders, eyeglass frames and MP3 players.

Makers, as they call themselves, can’t compete with the long, orderly rows of workers from the poorer provinces of China or India who cut, stitch and solder bras, shoes and cellphones for pennies — or even with the hundreds of billions of dollars a year worth of stuff that continues to pour out of large, old-fashioned American factories. Their method involves creating “hacker space” cooperatives, where a few dozen members share a 3-D printer, a laser cutter and an oscilloscope and engage in collaborative manufacturing projects. Makers have created companies like Shapeways and CloudFab, which for a fee will manufacture small runs of products that you design. They are becoming kit makers like Bdeir, manufacturing building blocks that allow others to create things.

Neil Gershenfeld, an M.I.T. physicist who is an intellectual godfather to the maker movement, suggested to me that the new tools would over time change global industry as we know it. He predicts a wave of new competitors for the megacorporation that designs, makes and sells products all under one brand. Instead, Gershenfeld imagines a consumer of the near future downloading a design for a mobile phone through an iTunes-like portal; buying an add-on from another firm that tweaks the design; and having it printed at a neighborhood shop in a plastic shell of your choice.

The new personal factories may seem like crude toys for only the most die-hard D.I.Y.-ers. But in technology circles, they are talked about as a looming revolution that could change the way people work and create new opportunities for millions. Personal factories can perhaps be compared to the earliest personal computers — versions of their giant counterparts that are drastically cheaper but also slower and more clumsy. This futuristic vision is the one that the White House endorsed in a recent report on personal manufacturing: “Within a generation, you will have a hard time explaining to your grandchildren how you were able to live without your own fabber,” it said, using a popular word for the new manufacturing tools. “Personal-fabrication technologies present an opportunity for our nation to continue to lead the rest of the world in manufacturing, but in a new way.”

Before they could create their own little manufacturing hub in Detroit, Andrew and Ted Sliwinski and their associates had to cleanse their industrial space of the stench of meat. Bucket after bucket of hydrogen peroxide and bleach helped to turn a former cold-storage warehouse in the Eastern Market of Detroit into a D.I.Y. manufacturing cooperative.

The Sliwinski brothers came to Detroit from the suburbs of Philadelphia with the romantic notion of partaking in a revival of the city’s tradition of making things. They and their colleagues rent the 7,200-square-foot warehouse, where more than two dozen members of the cooperative share laser cutters, 3-D printers, plastic vacuums and power drills. The ground floor holds the more basic appliances — drills and saws and such. Once a week, they open up the space, named OmniCorpDetroit, to the public for an “open hack night” — something that many cooperatives do. (Since our meeting, Andrew decided to move again, to California, where he plans to establish a new hacker space.)

Andrew and Ted have their desks upstairs, where the fancier work is done: there are electronics-making stations, with oscilloscopes and other tools; a community sewing center with machines that do complex embroidery; there is MakerBot Industries’ CupCake CNC, a so-called 3-D printer that spits out small plastic wares. Makers describe it as the IBM PC of personal factories — at $699 and sold in kits for assembly at home, it is the democratizing technology.

When I was there, I felt an urge to make something of my own. Andrew volunteered to help. He is 28 and slender, with a thick, rust-hued beard. He was wearing a wool hat, thick-framed plastic glasses, a black hoodie and black jeans, giving him more the look of know-it-all record-store clerk than of manufacturing champion. But the man knew what he was doing. He guided me to the Web site Thingiverse.com, which abounds in digital models — three-dimensional files that the CupCake can print out. I browsed and chose an iPad stand.

Photo

Build-a-Brother Andrew, seated, and Ted Sliwinski in their Detroit workshop.Credit
Brian Finke for The New York Times

I downloaded the files, and the computer processed them. The CupCake is a wood box, about the size of a blender, with open windows on three sides. The fourth side is covered with a rainbow thicket of wires and circuits; a spool of black plastic coil, which is melted to create the final object, poked in through the roof. As we instructed the computer to print, Andrew warned,“Oh, yeah, and it will start to smell like burning plastic.”

Which it soon did. The CupCake began to print. First the nozzle moved back and forth smoothly, dropping black plastic in neat rows. It was building a base for my object. Then it began to jitterbug, dashing unpredictably this way and that, depositing bits of the melting goo one layer at a time. Slowly it formed an iPad stand. But then, 19 minutes in, the machine lost the plot and began to squirt everywhere, and we had to start over.

We raised the melting temperature and tried again. Failure once more. Andrew tinkered with the machine and repeatedly muttered, “It’s not superhappy right now.” It was hard not to wonder whether it wouldn’t be easier just to have the Chinese do it.

Andrew said that the design I picked might have been flawed. We decided to try something easier: a hexagonal nut. At last, in less than half an hour, we had our perfect little nut. It was simple, unambitious and wonderful, though it might have been quicker to get it at a hardware store.

At the end of a long day, I accompanied a handful of makers to dinner at the nearby Cass Cafe. It was full of students and the artsy types now trickling into the city. Detroiters have various levels of appreciation and contempt for these outsiders, with their taste for all things free-range, open-source and wiki. OmniCorp fits well into this mix, because for its members and others in the maker community, manufacturing is about more than economic renewal; it is also about pushing back against the passivity that technology has bred, about being a smart consumer who knows what goes into your stuff. Making, for some, is a new liberal virtue. Andrew told me one day: “There is something calming or reassuring or relaxing that happens when you build something with your hands. You’ve just made something bigger than yourself. You’re not just being a consumer anymore.”

When Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone went office hunting in New York and found the perfect loft five blocks from Wall Street, they ran into two peculiar requirements from the landlord: they could rent the place if they had nothing to do with hedge funds and investment banks and if they could produce bank statements showing that their rent money was kept in such banalities as savings accounts, not in derivatives or futures. The landlord learned a lesson from the previous tenant, a trader who vacated when Wall Street collapsed.

The landlord was sufficiently reassured by the nature of the business, which is to do in a $6,000-a-month Manhattan apartment what the conventional wisdom says can profitably be done only in Shenzhen. Their company, Adafruit Industries, sells do-it-yourself electronics kits, which they manufacture and ship so that you, in turn, can make your own crude iPod equivalent or bespoke baby monitor or D.I.Y. phone charger. They are regarded as trailblazers among their fellow makers, because they actually manufacture in Manhattan and profitably. According to Torrone, the company had $2 million in sales in 2009, up from $60,000 in 2005, its first year.

In Adafruit’s spacious loft, seven full-time employees, Torrone and Fried, the engineer-founder who owns the company, labor away on the kits. The full-timers are paid more than $50,000 a year and receive health benefits. I asked Torrone, the creative director, how it was possible to compensate these employees and create physical things profitably in Manhattan. He told me that making things right where they are invented allows Adafruit to build, test and perfect new products more swiftly. The higher price of rent and labor are balanced by a reduction in shipping bills, so that the costs are manageable. One of the company’s best-selling kits, for a battery-powered cellphone charger, costs Adafruit $6 in parts and labor, Torrone said, and is sold to retailers for roughly $12. Moreover, he said, being in New York gives the company access to creativity and talent that is worth paying for.

“It would be cheaper if we were in the middle of nowhere,” Torrone told me, “but we’d be stuck in the middle of nowhere.”

Adafruit also illustrates how a good part of this new manufacturing operates through open-source sharing and what can be called social tinkering, in contrast with the manufacturing of the past, which emphasized patents, trade secrets and proprietary invention. Fried got the idea for such a company when, as a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab, she began making simple MP3 players and cellphone jammers, just for nerdy kicks, and made the recipes for her creations — CAD files, software, mechanical drawings — public on her blog. Requests poured in for kits that would allow people to make what she designed, and Adafruit was born.

Today Adafruit remains an open-source company. It publicizes how its kits are made, so that you can clone them, and also reveals how it runs as a business. The company says which Internet service provider it uses, which shipping company, which software runs its online shopping system. Torrone told me that they share this information so that other companies, including rivals, can cut to the chase of genuine discovery and not get bogged down reinventing wheels.

At Adafruit, I did some quality-assurance work, which seemed a good way of understanding what the company did. I tested 40 circuit boards by pressing them against a set of pins. Thirty-seven passed. I placed each board in a pink bag and heat-sealed it. Later, I ran checks on bagged kits to find which of three clear light bulbs mistakenly shone yellow when electrified.

It was surreal to do this assembly-line work in Lower Manhattan. It felt like a violation of the economic laws of nature. The tasks were at once mindless and engaging. They required focus, because if you were distracted for a minute, you would mess up and your error would ramify into the world. But it also felt as if it could get old fairly quickly. The most invigorating part was that I didn’t think about e-mail, my phone or Twitter while I was making. I was, against all modern odds, indivisibly present.

It was that very feeling that Ayah Bdeir craved after leaving the world of finance. When that world tumbled into full-fledged crisis at the end of 2008, pangs of guilt shot through her. It was her swaps that had done this. “I was shocked, and I felt bad, because somehow I was contributing to this injustice, and I had no idea,” she told me. “I felt guilty for a while. I have three degrees; I speak three languages; I pride myself on my scientific and mathematical thinking — how could I not have understood the social, economic and political dimensions of something that I was working on that ended up ruining the world?”

She has now found peace in her littleBits. On my trip to New York, I was able to play with her prototype kit. (The real ones, a first batch of 300, will be shipped to customers this spring.) The little Lego-like bricks snapped together magnetically and repelled one another when you put them the wrong way, which prevents electric shocks or unintentional meltdowns. The kit is simple enough for children to play with. But Bdeir keeps a black notebook of ideas for future bricks that she hopes will allow customers to make more-complex machines.

She told me that when she received the packaging for her prototype and finally had the total kit in hand, as it would come to customers, she sent her family an e-mail: “LittleBits exists in the world because of me.” It was the heralding of the new and a last swipe at her own past: she now could boast of a real and tangible contribution — something that was because she made it.

Correction: May 15, 2011

An article on Page 50 this weekend about a do-it-yourself movement in the United States misidentifies an object made by the author, Anand Giridharadas, with the help of a 3-D printing machine. It was, basically, a nut, not a bolt.

Anand Giridharadas (a@anand.ly) is an online columnist for The Times and the author of “India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking.” Editor: Ilena Silverman (i.silverman-maggroup@nytimes.com).

A version of this article appears in print on May 15, 2011, on page MM50 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: MEET THE MAKERS. Today's Paper|Subscribe